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When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

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Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#381

Post by digging »

bestouff wrote: post #172
marginalia_nu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his…

> people you talk to online are just googling up wikipedia articles to base their world view upon on the fly. Well you're lucky if they do; often they just make stuff up on the fly depending on what they saw on some dubious media or social network.

Would this be different in a world without writing? We generally synthesize incoming information into a knowledge base and a set of beliefs - I'm not convinced we're less susceptible to that when all knowledge is oral.

What's the difference between having read something last year and believing it, vs having heard someone tell you something last year and believing it? Would people stop in a conversation and go try to find the source of their information if they had to track down a specific person?

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#382

Post by larve »

Zetice wrote: post #379
DoreenMichele wrote: post #341

Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT. I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing. I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such. Thinking and writing d…

I'm sorry but your job as a homeschooler is to teach your sons to write. That's not a skill you can enter adulthood without, and expect to achieve success. Liking it, not liking it... none of that matters when you're asked to document a process or argue in favor of an idea. Imagine the value a professional teacher would have provided for them...

Which is exactly what the op did, patiently over several years. Homeschooling vs “professional” education is a different discussion.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#383

Post by DoreenMichele »

Zetice wrote: post #379
DoreenMichele wrote: post #341

Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT. I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing. I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such. Thinking and writing d…

I'm sorry but your job as a homeschooler is to teach your sons to write. That's not a skill you can enter adulthood without, and expect to achieve success. Liking it, not liking it... none of that matters when you're asked to document a process or argue in favor of an idea. Imagine the value a professional teacher would have provided for them...

After five years of not being forced to write while learning grammar etc some other way, he discovered fan fiction and began writing thousands of words per day.

But he didn't learn to write by writing because he had dysgraphia and emotional baggage about writing from public school when I pulled him out.

His blog writing gets more traffic than mine. He's a writer by trade, though he doesn't yet make much money at it.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#384

Post by Zetice »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #383
Zetice wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but your job as a homeschooler is to teach your sons to write. That's not a skill you can enter adulthood without, and expect to achieve success. Liking it, not liking it... none of that matters when you're asked to document a process or argue in favor of an idea. Imagine the value a professional teacher would have provided for them...

After five years of not being forced to write while learning grammar etc some other way, he discovered fan fiction and began writing thousands of words per day. But he didn't learn to write by writing because he had dysgraphia and emotional baggage about writing from public school when I pulled him out. His blog writing gets more traffic than mine. He's a writer by trade, though he doesn't yet make much money at it.

I misunderstood the situation. Apologies.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#385

Post by jjk166 »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #160
passion__desire wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please write a paragraph from the point of view of thinker, writer, storyteller like George R R Martin who loves to enthusiastically express why he loves "writing" Make sure to give lot of importance to Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It should all tie in together. Also make sure to include phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" coined by Noam Chomsky in the most meaningful, appropriate, context…

On the one hand, very interesting at a technical level. However, on the other, it's cheesy, horribly unoriginal and bland in its output, and that doesn't just apply to just this example. Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far would be winning any awards or get recommended by a critic. Structure-wise, the output is generally very formulaic, even with additional descriptors.

> Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far would be winning any awards or get recommended by a critic.

What paragraph have you written that won awards or was recommended by a critic? I have none to my name. These are tools whose goal is not to produce something superior to what any human could ever write, it is useful merely to improve upon what a typical person would write.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#386

Post by smolder »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #61
weinzierl wrote: post #23

I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy most people write day in day out. Be it stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, school essays with standardized expectations or formulaic messages and emails. Not much ability to lose there, but AI is a tremendous timesaver. A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much useful there in its current state.

I'm sorry but most ChatGPT output is functionally indistinct from a pg "quality" essay: Make banal observation about recent technological development. Explain it's "disruptive potential" for legacy industry. Express mild concern about possible social impact on group. Conclude that such concerns are overblown and that tech workers / investors can make shit loads of money while making the world a better, happier place…

Not to defend pg specifically, but do you think your insulting him here has more value than what people get from his "vacuous prose"? I think ChatGPT could output something like your comment, too.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#388

Post by Night_Thastus »

I'm not really a fan of ChatGPT, I think it's overhyped and oversold, and very fundamentally limited.

But I also completely disagree with his take, it's too broad and sweeping.

Offloading some cognitive load does not suddenly make people stupider. It just means that their focus can go elsewhere. Nor do tools that abstract away some processes.

A good example is driving. Does a manual transmission require more focus and thought? Sure! But that's focus and thought that can instead go into paying attention to surroundings. Same with having a GPS. Not having to think about the layout of the city, or how to use a map, just leaves less distraction and cognitive load.

Another is programming. Having high-level languages instead of having to write assembly does not make programmers worse. It just means that instead of having to worry about byte alignment, structure packing and nuanced cache details - they can instead focus on providing more features and functionality to the end user - which is a good thing!

ChatGPT at its best will be like those two examples. Something that removes some existing load and lets us handle higher level, more abstract problems.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#389

Post by digging »

barrkel wrote: post #35
rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned signed version). This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head.…

> The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks.

Interesting, because I still find it faster/easier to do a quick DDG search, with a click on the first relevant SO post, and scrolling straight to the top answer. Asking the same question to ChatGPT means waiting for its output, which may be objectively a few ms faster but creates the perception of slowness ( = irritation). (That is: waiting for X seconds is more disruptive than taking several actions for 1.5X seconds.)

And then it's definitely going to be much more verbose, which is worse 99% of the time. SO is nicely folded - if I want a deeper explanation, I look at the answer's comments, or I can read other answers, or I can even read the full question. ChatGPT doesn't have the same guarantee of such a clear information hierarchy in its answers.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#390

Post by drc500free »

kqr wrote: post #29
weinzierl wrote: post #23

I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy most people write day in day out. Be it stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, school essays with standardized expectations or formulaic messages and emails. Not much ability to lose there, but AI is a tremendous timesaver. A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much useful there in its current state.

I don't know about other people, but it helps my thinking process to write things in stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, etc. also. It forces me to combat edge cases that I didn't think about until I had to spell them out. Not always, of course, but perhaps often enough that it's worth it to know how to. Even formulaic messages and emails can be useful, because when what I want to write doesn't plug in neatly into t…

Same deal with those warning words - mine are "enable" and "leverage." Smells that I'm handwaving away something I should be specific about, which means I don't understand it as well as I should.
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